Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset

Last month, I posted a plea for help to try to figure out why sometimes (or rarely) (or frequently), Windows Installer fails to set an internal property that causes a never-ending “please wait” dialog. I got lots of feedback—thanks!—but unfortunately, nothing that helped me pinpoint a cause or a solution. So it’s time to make [...]

Don’t complicate your setups by doing more than you have to. Here are a few things I’ve run into lately of people doing more than they have to and opening themselves up to potential bugs or increased risk of getting something wrong. Some attributes are optional, really. Rob and I have blogged before about the [...]

There’s a bug that the WixUI “Please wait while the installer finishes determining your disk space requirements” dialog is intermittently shown forever, never finishing the costing process to continue installation. I’ve seen that bug before have ... [More] never been able to reproduce it reliably. The disk costing process is something Windows Installer does in the background [...] [Less]

I’m currently spending a lot of time working with custom actions, removing them where I can and improving them where they’re still necessary. The biggest change I’m making is to make the custom actions data driven using the immediate/deferred/rollback custom action triad. One of the advantages in doing so is that I can use Lux [...]

WiX v3.0 and v3.5 executables are available in .zip form and x86 and x64 .msi packages. The x64 .msi package was originally created because we need to install the WiX targets and tasks for 64-bit MSBuild into a 64-bit directory, something that’s not supported for x86 packages. Late in the WiX v3.0 development cycle, Jason [...]

When WiX v3.0 was in early, active development, the guidance we gave folks who wanted to start using its features was: “Sure, start using WiX v3.0! But pick up new builds at least once a month or so.” There were three Reasons for Taking Frequent WiX Drops (RTFWD, for short): The v3.0 schema was changing [...]

I’ve been using Mercurial, a distributed version-control system, for a while now at home. Even without using a DVCS’s distributed nature, they make a great choice for a personal version control system: They all share the common trait that they keep all version history on the local system; most centralized VCSes keep only the latest [...]

Microsoft’s Giving Campaign is an annual opportunity to focus on employee charitable giving and volunteerism. They’re not limited to a single calendar month, of course, but the campaign provides the opportunity to run company-wide initiatives like a ... [More] charity auction. The auction is an opportunity for employees to donate physical goods (homemade baked goods a specialty) [...] [Less]

Copyright 2018 Joy of Setup LLC This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. All postings are provided “AS IS” with no warranties and confer no rights.

Copyright 2018 Joy of Setup LLC This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. All postings are provided “AS IS” with no warranties and confer no rights.